To ask if your kids are going to grandparents?

[Tedtalk]

May have already been asked, so apologies if repeated

My next door neighbour is in her late 50s. She is now working from home. Her daughter is also working from home (not wearing work clothes) and drops her kids off to my neighbour 2/3 times weekly, sometimes stopping for a cuppa in the garden.

I'd assumed this was all allowed until someone I mentioned it to questioned it.

Can anyone clarify this for me?
Any experiences?

@Frompcat lol I guessed that, trust us to have similar names!

@ilovecakeandwine but can you work from home?

Seems to me that @ilovedjerrymore can’t work from home. So are they expected to just stop working?

I’m in a lucky position that I can wfh. But I have two kids under 3. Dh is also working from home. It’s exhausting. One of us is up at 5.30/6 and works until about 12. The other works from 1 to bathtime then we both log back on is we need to.

It's allowed for kids from separated parents to go to the other parents house on public transport, therefore mixing two households. So how is a child going to stay with a grandparent any different?

Out of interest, I have been formally designated as a keyworker as I run a technical team responsible for providing essential technology services to a large electricity company.

I normally commute to a City and wear office wear, but am now working from home in very different casual attire - so you don't always know who's a keyworker, even if you think you do.

My neighbours (similar age) regularly have their grandson round (and his father, their son) at weekends. Both the child's parents are key workers and the child goes to school during the week.

I've been tempted to ask them why the rules don't apply to them, but have resisted.

I’m a single parent and I can’t work from home and can’t be furloughed. I work outside of school hours and I can’t change my hours. I’ve had no choice but to use my ex’s mum as childcare. My ex has now been furloughed so he can have Dd instead of his mum which makes me feel less guilty as kids are allowed to go their dads! Not everyone is just being selfish and bending the rules to suit them. Some of us don’t have much choice.

As for not being my business, isn't this all our business if looking for clarification and to stop the spread?

That depends on whether you really want to turn us into a North Korea or former East Germany where neighbours spy on neighbours, friends on friends, colleagues on colleagues. Yes, we need to follow the guidance and do everything we can to support the strategy but it is never going to be complied with 100% and we shouldn't destroy all trust and sense of community in our society by turning on each other at every opportunity. Some people just need to get on with their own lives and keep their noses out of others unless they are being directly impacted.

It's not just keyworkers who are "allowed" to go to work. If I am unfurloughed soon I'll have to get my dad to look after my DS; the nurseries where I live (major hospital town) are only taking children of NHS workers, and my childminder has decided to isolate for the next 12 weeks. I'll be without choice!

Also I’m not allowed to wear my uniform outside of work because of infection control rules so to other people I’d just look like I was dressed casually and dropping Dd off for the fun of it!

My mum normally has my son but currently isn't. It's a nightmare because I'm NHS so still working and my husband is a self employed gardener so I'm doing my FT job over 3 days and DH is working the other 4

I can't wait til she's able to have him again and she misses him so much

Do apologise reading thread back I have shouted and I apologise to anyone if they think i have been rude. I am just so upset with some people’s attitudes on here and other threads.

I would LOVE to be working from home at these scary times BUT I can’t. We are following the guidelines as much as we can. I don’t go in to my mums house I wait in the car just in hope that will help reduce the risk for everyone.

I am an emotional wreck at the moment we sadly lost a relative last week due to this horrid virus so believe me I know how scary it is. Then to have people saying I should be at home looking after my own child when I can’t and not understanding that not everyone can it’s does make the whole situation worse.

I would love to be in the garden at this very moment with my feet in the pool playing with my son answering emails etc instead I will look forward to doing that this weekend.

I’m signing off now.

Please take care everyone and remember please be kind and think of others when times are hard like now and remember everyone is dealing with their own things and trying to make this work.

TooTrueToBeGood
I agree. As I see it, this is absolutely a case of social responsibility, and I have myriad social responsibilities beyond coronavirus.

My household can more easily socially distance than many others, so we have done. It is my responsibility to look at what we can do, not to look around to see what others are doing/not doing and then search for justifications to reduce my own efforts.

It is also my responsibility not to make this time even more awful for the people who are really suffering. We've already had a case of some self-righteous vigilante slashing the tyres of an ICU nurse.

I will not waste time pondering whether Mrs Goggins down the street should be having visits from her children when for all I know she has a history of self-harm and her adult children can see her mental health is spiralling.

Someone I know is disabled and employs a private carer. That carer has been stopped by the police three times. It's one thing if that was a random road check by the police, but it's quite another thing if she's getting stopped repeatedly because one of her neighbours has been reporting her for leaving the house.

@PotholeParadise 100% this.

@Raindancer411 the guidance states you can go out to help a vulnerable person or for a medical need. I'm taking this to include a grandparent looking my other two DCs while I'm in labour and my husband is with me at the hospital. My mum is under 70 and has been very careful social distancing so that's what we'll be doing, and I can't believe we'll be the only ones. Just in case that helps you at al.

Send them to be looked after by a grandparents in their 50’s or to different childcare settings staffed by adults in their sixties. A potential scenario, what would you do then? I think people are so desperate for rules they are unable to see the wood for the trees.

Can we also mention that the word 'grandparent' isn't synonymous with elderly people! I'm in my early forties, still with primary age DC at home, but my adult DS has a baby so I'm also a grandparent!

Childcare is allowed, it's specifically mentioned in the legislation. It beggars belief that weeks later, some people STILL don't seem to realise this (or are being deliberately obtuse...?). A relative who is not in a higher risk category providing childcare for a child is much preferable to them attending nursery or a school setting in terms of reducing the number of people that are mixing overall and so reducing transmission of the virus. Two households that are mixed due to childcare are highly unlikely to reduce transmission or benefit in any way from socially distancing the other members of the household as the transmission link - the child - exists in both households. Therefore there's no reason for the other household members to socially distance from each other in that situation as if someone catches the virus in either household they have a link for transmission anyway, through the child. Although there is emerging research to suggest that children don't spread the virus anywhere near as much as adults do to be fair, so perhaps it actually would be prudent to maintain distance between the other family members.

But you are allowed to leave home to provide care for vulnerable people ie) children. It’s there in the guidance. The government don’t want to encourage it due to some grandparents being elderly or shielded, but where they’re not and the care is necessary for the parents to work, I don’t think it’s an issue.

@ScrimpshawTheSecond

"No. I'm scared for my parents to go to the supermarket, let alone have young kids around them."

What's your plan if we don't get a vaccine?

We all have to learn to live with this virus. The vaccine being trailed possibly won't work for the over 70's and will have a low success rate for the over 60's. It then becomes a choice of quality over quantity.

Grandparents are allowed to do childcare. We've had that clarified. It's less risky than sending them to school. The science has moved on and we now know that the chance of transmission is less from children.

Hospitals are no longer full we are told.

Are you all planning on never seeing family again? What do you think the difference will be come the 21st May?

Can I also mention that anyone over 60 is not an old dear to be molly coddled, I am over 60 & volunteer with rough sleepers, we are telephoned by (young?) social workers WFH asking us to go out and search the streets for missing persons .... which we do, because we care.

Regarding transmission, two my closest relatives work in paediatrics and they have only had a very small number of children in diagnosed with coronavirus. Even more interestingly, not a single member of any of these children's families got symptoms.

@HildaSnibbs Thank you 😊

MeadowHay, that is the latest bit of science. It's to do with receptor cells. Sarah Gilbert of the Oxford University team explained it. The boy who contracted it while skiing gave his common cold to his Siblings, but not Covid. He came into contact with 170 people and not one of them got it.

I have not the slightest idea, Ponoka, I'm living day to day! I don't really see the govt have much of an exit plan, either.

And visiting g-parents for us would require ferry travel - the boat won't take anyone who doesn't live there or need to travel for emergency reasons.

Please do post links to the science regards children being lower risk of transmission, if you have them? I'd be interested to read them.

If it was the choice between sending my children to nursery or school or their grandparents I would choose the grandparents every time.